Creating a commercially sponsored culturematic to personalize the impersonal: marketing London’s Heathrow Airport through light philosophical literature.

Meta Experiences, Heathrow Airport, London, England

Sunday I had the meta-experience of reading Alain de Botton’s A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary while departing from Heathrow. Sponsored by BAA (Heathrow’s owner), the book is part of an interesting experiment:

In the summer of 2009, however, Alain de Botton was given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around Heathrow, one of the world’s biggest airports, having been appointed its Writer-in-Residence. He spoke with everyone from airline staff and senior executives to travellers passing through, and based on these conversations he produced this extraordinary account of life at an airport and what it says about modern existence.

A couple non-profound thoughts after following the project from announcement to launch and reading the book Sunday while departing from Heathrow:

• I’m not an adept reviewer of literature, but I like the book. I discovered de Botton fairly late, picking up his book The Art of Travel in the Tate Modern in London back in 2005; while de Botton’s subject matter, style and understated thoughtfulness isn’t for everyone, his interests and thoughts resonate with me. A Week At The Airport explores Heathrow with a thoughtful, poking, humane eye, a survey of the people and machinery behind the impersonal behemoth. Alain revisits some of the themes behind The Art of Travel but tells new stories, digging up snippets of experiences from people working in and passing through Heathrow. I like his wry insights, a mix of pithy and profound looks into the seemingly superficial and the forgotten bits of our lives. A Week At The Airport won’t change your life in 107 pages, but if will help guide your mind and eye if you’re willing to look.
• Let’s not forget: this is marketing. At the end of the day, this is marketing. Alain explains in the very beginning that the idea for the book came from Grupo Ferrovial (the company that owns BAA, the owner of Heathrow Airport), and that he was sponsored by BAA to wander and write about his experiences in the airport’s shiny, expensive new Terminal 5. Alain spent a week at a desk in the terminal’s Departures zone as the first “writer in residence” collecting stories and insights from employees and passengers. After the week in residence, Alain finished the book in mere couple of weeks. The book was then published and brought to market in another couple of weeks, far faster than traditional bound literature.

  For a marketer, the book is an interesting way for a B2B business to engage it’s customers’ customers (i.e. passengers, travelers, shoppers) though a very different, unexpected and indirect method and medium. Will people care? Will this commercially sponsored culturematic resonate with people unfamiliar with or uninterested in de Botton? Will other writers and companies copy the idea?

  Will this marketing experiment work for BAA? How much did the experiment cost? Will BAA even be able to measure the impact? I don’t know, but I’d be interested to find out.

• How will JetBlue maximize their All-You-Can-Jet promotion? JetBlue garnered a fair bit of publicity through their All-You-Can-Jet (AYCJ) promotion earlier this summer; will JetBlue gather stories from AYCJ travelers and utilize the more interesting stories (the potential culturematics) created by their travelers to help promote JetBlue, air travel and the impact travel can have on people’s lives?

  Wired.com sponsored Brendan Ross to spend an entire month traveling on JetBlue, flying city to city, finding stories to tell along the way. Alaska Miller created his own AYCJ schedule and is sharing his stories from the road; friends Will and Cara Dearman (@wtd and @thinkc) created their own adventure to take advantage of the opportunity; who do you know taking advantage of the All You Can Jet pass?

• People listen to stories. Stories, analogies and personal experiences are powerful ways to communicate and connect. Obvious, but hard; the paucity of stories that we all know and understand highlights how hard it is to create great stories that people care about. Companies: consider the untapped power in the untold stories of your employees, users and customers; personalize the impersonal, connect the creator to the user, unearth and scale the “awesomeness” deep in your people. Stories are more powerful than messages.

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How to get the book
Starting September 28th, Alain de Botton’s A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary is available:

• For purchase at WH Smith Books retailers in Heathrow
• Free at Costa Coffee in Heathrow (for a limited time, with a drink/food purchase at Costa Coffee, until the 10K supply runs out)
• For purchase online through Amazon UK
• For purcahse online from third-parties through Amazon US until the book is released in the US in 2010.